Chaos Girl Rewrites the Script novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Hattie's House

Tilda's grandmother loves the new Tilda, Quincy waits on the front step, and Marguerite orders her to a Thursday lunch that Tilda realizes is the first death step.

My grandmother opened the front door at one in the morning in a silk robe and a green face mask, and asked if I had killed him.

"No," I said. "I only ended it."

"Pity. I brought a mop."

She had it in her left hand.

Behind me, the cab driver cleared his throat.

My card had been declined twice in his back seat.

Marguerite Moncrieff had frozen every account I owned in the twenty minutes it took me to find my coat.

Grandma Hattie paid him in cash and added forty percent, because he had listened to me hum the whole way home.

Then she took my arm and walked me into the townhouse.

"Sit. Toast," she said. "Tell me everything."

I could not tell her everything.

So I told her the true part.

"I walked onto the stage and dumped him in front of two hundred people, and I kept the dress."

Hattie stared at me for a long moment.

"You returned the ring?"

"In a bag from the ladies' room, with the time on it."

She sat down hard on a kitchen stool and laughed until her mask cracked.

"Forty years I've waited for an Ellerby to leave a party early without stealing a vase."

"Grandma, are you okay?"

"The doctor gave me six months in 2009," she said, wiping her eyes. "Ellerbys don't die on schedule."

I held on to that sentence harder than I let her see.

While the toast cooked, I walked the kitchen with my phone flashlight.

The cord of the toaster ran across the stove.

The rug at the foot of the stairs had a curled corner.

The back-door lock stuck unless you lifted the handle first.

"What are you doing?" Hattie asked.

"Looking at hazards."

"You have never looked at a stair in your life. You once asked a stair to carry your bag."

"I'm turning over a new leaf."

"Then turn it faster. The leaf has a visitor."

She pointed at the front window.

Quincy Moncrieff was sitting on my grandmother's top step in his tuxedo, with his elbows on his knees and the ring still in its plastic bag beside him.

I opened the door.

"You can't just leave a party like that," he said without looking up.

"I can. I did."

"I had a speech."

"I know. You can have the stage back next time."

He turned to face me then.

He had taken off his bow tie and put it in his pocket.

"My mother froze your cards."

"I noticed. The driver noticed."

"I can fix that. Take mine."

He held out a black card between two fingers.

"No," I said.

"It's a gift."

"A gift is item thirteen. I'd have to write you a receipt."

Grandma Hattie, from the kitchen doorway, said, "Let her keep nothing. It's healthy."

Quincy looked at the card, then put it back.

His watch was on his left wrist, and he checked it, although he had nowhere to be.

"Then you'll hear it from me," he said. "My mother has called a lunch on Thursday at the club. It's a reconciliation. You're to apologize to Posy and to the guests."

"For what? I didn't throw anything."

"That is exactly why she's furious. It's a seating chart, Tilda. She has you between the lawyer and the potted palm."

"I'm not apologizing to anyone."

"I told her you wouldn't. She said you'd come anyway, because you can't stand being discussed in a room you're not in."

That part was true of the old Tilda, and I hated that it was.

"I'll send a car at noon," he said.

"I'll take the bus."

"There's no bus to the club."

"Then I'll walk."

He stood, brushed off his trousers, and looked at me for one second too long.

"Goodnight, Tilda."

He left the ring in its bag on the step.

I picked it up, put it in the mailbox for the courier, and closed the door.

Then I stood in the hall with my hand still on the lock.

Thursday.

The window seat.

A lunch at the club with Marguerite, a lawyer, a potted palm and Posy, and a salad dressing I was going to be blamed for.

It was chapter five of the book.

It was the lunch where Posy Linden ate something that nearly killed her, and I took the blame.

Thursday was the first scene I was supposed to lose.

And it was in four days.

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